Hacker News Reader

Comment by GiorgioG | Hacker News Reader

Super-excited for this release. I wish someone would put some resources into the Elixir IntelliJ plugin. I've tried, but I just can't enjoy using VSCode (vs IntelliJ based IDEs, Visual Studio, etc.)

View on HN

Absolutely agree. I love Elixir but the editor integration has always been unfortunately second-class. The happy paths in VSCode work well enough with the ElixirLS, but there are a few flaws that are a quite a bummer. One major one is no rename / refactor functionality (seriously?!) and a more Phoenix-specific issue is trying to contend with auto-complete in templates, which is no fun.

I like VSCode fine, but I'd definitely be interested in a Jetbrains level IDE for Elixir stuff.

Use lexical instead of elixirls and most of your worries will be gone

Oh man, I can't wait to try this out. Thanks for the pointer!

It frustrates me to no end that we have three separate, incomplete LSP implementations for Elixir, none of them collaborate and none of them are first party tools from the language maintainers - they're all minor community figures. They are one of the jankiest part of my experiences working with the language and it's very disappointing to live with when I also use rust-analyzer all the time and have seen the polished & productive version of LSP support.

FWIW I have moved to next-ls because IIRC José is a premium sponsor of the project, so I feel safe relying on it for the time being. Agree that the duplication is unnecessary and wasteful.

Same. I would pay 50 / month for an Elixir plugin that had a comparable amount of polish to RubyMine.

Zed has been amazing so far for my Elixir journey, and their latest preview release has additional support for Elixir tests. Not sure how it compares to IntelliJ

I’ve also been using Elixir + Zed for the last couple months. Love it. And it’s so snappy. It’s the first editor I’ve found where ElixirLS doesn’t feel like it’s making my editor lag. Not sure what they do differently.

From what I gather it’s a combination of immutable data structures, light caching, and running the lsp/treesitter in background processes. The founder has a bunch of interesting interviews going deep into the mechanics if you’re interested!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com